Dead Voices

by Rick Hautala

  Even as he said that, the gauzy blue figure of the young girl slipped out of the black night, drifting without a trace of resistance within the pentagram design. Elizabeth recoiled as she felt chilly tendrils of fingers brush against her hands and arms and then, with a strength that shocked her, grab her wrists and start to pull back. The effort aided Elizabeth’s own efforts to draw the knife away from her chest, and relief flooded her when she looked down and saw the blade pulling from the sheath of her chest.

  “No!” Graydon wailed. “I won’t allow it!” He swung around in front of Elizabeth and leaned forward, trying to drive the blade back into her chest. He swung out wildly in an attempt to push the ghostly figure aside, but his hands passed through Caroline’s shape as easily as if she were made of shimmering light.

  From the gravestone, the demon reared back its head and let loose a shrill screech of rage. Flames flashed from its eyes, and searing waves of heat withered the grass all around the tombstone, setting it on fire. But the flames only licked up to the white line of the pentagram design; there they stopped and winked out, as though they were nothing more than brightly burning candles being blown out on a birthday cake.

  “I will have my revenge!” Graydon sputtered; but even as he did, the blue figure of Caroline, passing clear through him, pulled back hard on her mother’s hands. The knife continued to withdraw but still wasn’t clear of the wound it was making when, suddenly, the night crashed with three sharp, echoing roars. For a numbed instant, Elizabeth thought the demon’s rage had intensified. Only dimly was she aware of the searing pain in her wrist. She looked in horror and saw that her hand just below her thumb was nothing more than a pulpy wreck. After a frozen moment, blood began to run freely from the wound and down her arm.

  “Stop!” a voice shouted from the darkness.

  Elizabeth cringed when the concussion of two more explosions filled the night. She heard a wet-sounding thunk-thunk, and watched in horror as Graydon’s face exploded into a bright red splash. He spun around in a lazy half-circle and then crumpled in slow motion to the ground. Between Elizabeth and Graydon, the glowing blue figure of Caroline vanishyd with a slow, rippling fade. With a diminishing wail of anguish, the demon on Caroline’s tombstone sucked back into the night and was gone, leaving behind a thick sulfurous odor.

  The sudden release of pressure sent the blade spinning end over end into the darkness. A watery weakness swept through Elizabeth’s body. She struggled to stay standing, even though she had no sensation of her legs supporting her. The whole world around her rocked and pitched violently back and forth.

  Struggling to focus, she looked into the cold, smoky night. The face she saw moving rapidly toward her from the darkness was ashen white. Thick gouts of blood ran in tattered ribbons down over its eyes and cheeks. Its mouth was open, and as it came closer to her, the vision spoke, but Elizabeth could make no sense of its words. Thinking she was still falling forward into the open earth and onto her daughter’s coffin, she imagined she was a diver, arching smoothly into still, black water. Distantly, she heard the soft thump of impact as her head hit the ground. but then she was lost in total darkness. Her last thought before she was sucked down into darkness was ...

  It’s another demon from Hell, coming to take my soul!

  5.

  “Oh, my God! Elizabeth! No!” Frank shouted as he staggered up the slope of the cemetery hill. He didn’t have the time to process, much less believe, what he was seeing. The night sky at the top of the hill flickered wildly with bright lights ~at made it difficult to see exactly what was going on, but it sure as hell looked as though Roland Graydon was struggling with Elizabeth, trying to stab her with a wicked-looking knife. On reflex, Frank drew his revolver, crouched, took careful aim, and cracked off five quick shots. He felt only mild satisfaction through his fear when he saw Graydon’s body jerk violently and then drop to the ground.

  Gritting his teeth against his pain, he dashed the rest of the way just in time to see Elizabeth crumple face-first onto the ground. An inky splotch of blood blossomed on the ground beneath her chest. Frank rolled her over onto her back and watched as the blood saturated the thin fabric of her jacket. He leaned over her, ripped open her blouse, and inspected her wounds. Her body spasmed violently, as nerves fired and twisted her overstrained muscles into impossible contortions.

  “Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” Frank muttered as he stared at the slice the knife had made. Blood pumped like thick oil out onto the ground. Frank hurriedly untucked his shirt, ripped off a piece of cloth, and pressed it tightly against the wound.

  “Come on!” he murmured, rocking back and forth on his knees, cradling Elizabeth’s body as if she were a baby. “Come on, Elizabeth! Don’t lose this one!”

  For a long time — Frank had no idea how long — he sat there on the grass, applying pressure to stop the steady flow of blood. Eventually he succeeded, and, not long after that, he saw Elizabeth’s eyelids flicker. Her breathing, which had been rattling and faint, now seemed stronger.

  “You wait right here, babe,” he whispered, as he eased her flat on the ground and stood up. “I’ve just got to go back to the cruiser and put in a call for some help. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”

  With that, he raced down the hill and out of the cemetery to where his smashed cruiser lay on its roof in the ditch. Reaching in through the smashed windshield, he fished around blindly until his fingers grasped the radio microphone. Praying it would still work, he stood up shakily and pressed the call button. Relief flooded him when the dispatcher at the station answered him.

  “Oh, Christ,” he muttered as black waves of dizziness brought him to his knees in the shattered glass and metal. “Oh Jesus, God — thank you ... thank you!”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” the dispatcher said.

  Rubbing his blood-smeared hands over his face to clear his mind, Frank took a deep breath and, just before passing out, mumbled, “Better get an ambulance out to Oak Grove ... There’s been some —” Before he could say the word trouble, he collapsed backward onto the ground.

  6.

  Pain was all she knew even before she became aware. Centered in her chest, it seared along her nerves, steadily intensifying rather than deadening.

  — Pain!

  ... Like jagged, throbbing currents of electricity. Every inch of her body was bathed in intense pain. She was twisted and skinned and viciously jabbed by pain from every direction at once.

  — Pain!

  ... Like a cold voice from the dark, calling her, luring her to come to it, to follow it down into a flaming red Pit that only promised more pain ... sharper pain.

  — Pain!

  ... Like flat sheets of honed razors slicing through her body, sectioning it into a multitude of parts that all writhed in agony; pain that reached into the very center of her soul.

  — Pain as she had never known pain before ...

  ... direction less and without end.

  TWENTY

  Healing

  1.

  The sunlight slanting through the open slats of the Levolor blinds turned everything fuzzy-edged and glistening. Objects in the room shifted and transformed with a rubbery, hallucinatory wobble. The edges of the window sill jiggled with points of white and yellow flame. The air in the room had a deep-water density to it, and sounds coming from somewhere — the clanging of metal on metal, the scuff of feet passing over the floor, the rustle of starched cloth — rippled the air with their passing wake. The entire room sparkled with energy.

  With a stinging intake of breath that pierced her chest like the jab of a steel-tipped lance, Elizabeth tried to move but found even the slightest motion restricted. She opened her eyes to mere slits to allow in just a fraction of the hurtful yellow light and saw — and recognized — that she was in some type of institutional bed. Her view of the window was hazy, but through thick layers of shifting lights, she thought she saw metal bars on the windows. With an unvoiced groan, she released the useless muscle ten
sion in her body and let her mind slip back down ...

  ... down ...

  ... down into a pain-filled blackness, and then deeper, where even the pain couldn’t reach.

  Oh. my God! she thought, struggling futilely against wave after wave of dizziness and panic. They’ve locked me up after all! I’m in the mental ward!

  But at least there’s no more pain down here, she thought, as sludgy, black bubbles popped in her mind and she sank even deeper into herself. From far away she heard voices, but she couldn’t tell if they were outside or inside her head. She tried to understand what they were saying, but everything was incomprehensible, like the backward Latin Graydon had recited during the necromantic ceremony.

  Had that been real? Had any of that been real? Or was lout of my mind all along. and I imagined every bit of it? she wondered. The deeper she went, the less frantic she became as she drifted through a detached calm, falling backward ... down ... and down ...

  Two — maybe three — different voices ping-ponged in conversation, but none of it made any sense until she heard a voice she definitely recognized: her mother’s.

  “ ... her father and I have no idea what she was doing out there.”

  “ ... Strange design they drew over her daughter’s grave ... “

  “ ... No idea that she even thought about such nonsense ... “

  Elizabeth stirred, but knowing her body was strapped to the bed, she didn’t renew the struggle. Instead, she forced her awareness up to the surface, passing through the pain until she returned to the shimmering light in the hospital room.

  “ ... Not even sure she can hear us,” one of the other voices said.

  “ . . How long this will go on ... “

  “ ... Which way it’s going to go ... “

  “ ... No way of knowing at this point ... “

  Elizabeth’s mind jumped with the sudden understanding that these people were discussing her. Her brain sent out a message to her hand to rise, even if it was only a small amount just to signal that she could not only hear, but also understand; but her hand was frozen in place, locked to her side as though paralyzed.

  “ ... The trauma she’s suffered has been intense, and it’s natural that her body would shut down like this ... “

  “ ... If only to help process the shock ... “

  “ ... But she will be all right ... eventually? ... “

  Again, Elizabeth recognized her mother’s voice and the desperation that colored it. Like tatters of fast-moving storm clouds, tangled emotions and thoughts flittered through her. She redoubled her efforts to move, to produce just a twitch of a finger or a flicker of an eyelid, but no part of her body would obey the commands of her brain. Aren’t my eyes open? she screamed inside her mind. Not even the faintest ripple of sound would come from her throat. Her desperation rose higher until she could practically hear it — a high-pitched whine that bordered on the edge of awareness.

  She watched. her heart wrung with sadness, as tears coursed down her mother’s face. And then another realization hit her, hard. Like an oncoming car. Her mother was dressed in black, and her father had on the suit and coat he only wore on two different occasions: weddings and funerals.

  “ ... pity she had to die,” her mother was saying, her voice drifting to Elizabeth’s awareness through her flood of sadness and panic.

  “ ... better not to see her this way, after all,” her father said. Even he, with his stiff posture and firm-set mouth, seemed about to break down into tears. The sides of his face looked sallow and thin, as though he had been struggling with sadness for centuries.

  Do they think I’m dead? Am I laid out in my coffin at the funeral home? Is that why I can’t move? Elizabeth wondered. Her brain was spinning faster and faster into a whirlwind of terror. Every fiber of her being willed her throat to open and scream the words: But I’m not dead! ... See! I’m not!

  “ ... she’s at peace now ... “

  “ ... with her loved ones ... “

  I’m not dead! Elizabeth’s mind wailed, but as she looked from one saddened face to another, a warm, churning sensation of calm spread through her stomach. There was suddenly no fear in the idea that she might be dead-just an overwhelming sadness that she couldn’t see or talk to her mother and father to say one last goodbye ... Look at me! I’m not dead! she wanted to shout. I’m still alive! Look at me!

  But no amount of frantic effort or concentrated calmness would produce even the slightest stirring of sound in her throat.

  Where’s Aunt Junia? Elizabeth thought. She could understand why Aunt Elspeth wasn’t here, it being so difficult for her to get about, but why wasn’t Junia here to see her off? Especially if she was dying ... or already dead! Junia had gotten the whole thing started by encouraging her to see those people. She should be here!

  Suddenly, Elizabeth felt a warm rush travel down her legs from her belly. It reminded her of when she had been pregnant with Caroline, the night her water broke as a prelude to delivery. She knew she wasn’t pregnant, so her first thought was that it was the warm flow of blood rushing through her body and healing her. She experienced a tingle of fear when she recalled the nightmare of Graydon transforming into a wolf as he feasted on her innards. An arctic wind swept through her when she remembered ...

  Had it all been a dream?

  ... the demon perching on Caroline’s tombstone and saying: “Your soul is mine now! Forever! ... First her, and now you!”

  Elizabeth’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a loud thump sound. She was surprised to see that none of the other people in the room looked over to the door when it slammed open and a dark figure walked in and came over to the bed. At first, Elizabeth thought this must be a hospital orderly, coming in to take her physical remains away; but then she noticed how the “orderly” was dressed.

  No one works in a hospital dressed like that! Elizabeth thought.

  The person, an old woman, was wearing a tattered dress and a long woolen sweater. Moth holes peppered the sleeves. Her gray hair hung in loose snarls down to her shoulders. Her wrinkled face was shrouded and, even in the direct light, had a curious shadow cast across it. In her left hand she was carrying a large shopping bag.

  “Hey, Elizabeth — I’ve come to see yah,” the old woman crooned, leaning over the bed and looking for all the world like the wicked witch in Snow White.

  Spears of terror shot through Elizabeth’s mind, and she saw with horror that her left hand lying limply on the sheets, actually twitched. None of the people gathered around the bed seemed to notice the old woman, much less the motion Elizabeth had made. She looked up, wishing frantically that she could say something — anything — to alert the people to this woman, who stood there unseen among them.

  The old woman leaned closer to Elizabeth’s face. In her fevered imagination, Elizabeth could feel the cold drafts of the woman’s breath washing like clammy water over her face. The crone reeked of the putrid rot of the grave.

  This can’t be happening! Elizabeth thought. I’m already dead!

  The sound of paper rustling crackled like fire as the old woman lifted up her shopping bag and rested it on the bed railing.

  “I brought a little somethin’ for yah,” she said, smiling widely and exposing a mouth that was filled with rotting and’ blackened teeth. She hissed, “Wanna see what I’ve got here in my bag for yah?”

  Elizabeth knew she had no control over herself, but she violently willed herself to shake her head back and forth in denial She could feel each vertebra crunch as she tried to move her neck.

  “Wanna see?” the old lady wheezed.

  Elizabeth’s mind roared with the echoing sound of the crone’s ancient voice. With just a slight push, she could imagine the voice suddenly dropping down low and hollow, booming with evil laughter, like the voice of the demon she had seen — imagined! Crouching on Caroline’s tombstone. At any instant. she expected to see the frail body of the old woman tremble and swell as the wrinkled, liver-spotted skin peele
d away, exposing the black scaly body of the demon. It would expand to fill the entire hospital room, Muscular, black arms and hooked talons would reach for her, and a leering, fang filled smile would open to devour her.

  “Your soul is mine, now! Forever!”

  Elizabeth willed every ounce of mental energy into moving her head, if only to deny, right up to the end, that this creature might steal her soul and carry it to the flames of Hell

  The old crone smiled and laughed softly as she opened the top of the bag. After peering down into it for an instant, she scowled deeply as she reclosed the top. Leaning close to Elizabeth’s immobile face, she snarled wickedly, ‘‘I’ll show yah if yah want to see!” Her voice rose up on a teasing. tempting note. “Are you sure you don’t wanna see?”

  If the scream that was building up inside her mind ever found its escape, Elizabeth was positive it would shatter the hospital-room window. She watched in stark, mounting horror as the old woman opened the bag again and tilted it down toward her fear-widened eyes.

  “Come on, Elizabeth ... Have a little peek,” the woman said in a thin, wheedling voice.

  Elizabeth tried to look away, but the open mouth of the shopping bag slid down to the side of the bed with a slick, easy glide. Her eyes were drawn in horrid fascination to the dark opening.

  “See what I have?” the old lady crooned. “Look ... Look inside here.”

  Elizabeth felt a quick, jerking pulse and a burning pressure in her chest as she stared into the bag.

  “See ... ? I have all of your fears in here!”

  Elizabeth looked ... and saw. The woman suddenly pulled her hands back, and the shopping bag disappeared with a faint pool It left behind a squiggling trail of smoke which quickly disappeared.

  The crone smiled and said, “All gone.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring up at her mother, her father and two doctors.